In the talk I spoke about how Web 2.0 companies distinguish themselves by leveraging the network of which they are a part. Brittanica, for example, has had a web site for quite some time and were slow to leverage the network in any particular way. Wikipedia, on the other hand, exists only because they used the available network to improve their contents communally. And Wikipedia, of course, is a much, much more popular site.

Herbert Simon famously once said: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” This quote is turning into one of the mantras […]

In thinking about how the most successful sites model human behavior (my current meme), Amazon kept coming to mind. Amazon is amazing at modelling how we talk about books. Notice that I’m not just talking about buying books, I’m talking about how we talk about books. In other words, they don’t just make it easy […]